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Code's Worst Enemy
If you could snap your fingers and bring Perl 6 on Parrot's implementation up to the level of Rhino's, would you still choose JavaScript?
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The Future of Web Startups
October 2007 (This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.) There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very…
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Joel explains how a new monopoly will emerge around AJAX
IBM just released an open-source office suite called IBM Lotus Symphony. Sounds like Yet Another StarOffice distribution. But I suspect they’re probably trying to wipe out the memory of the origina…
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Why to Not Not Start a Startup
March 2007 (This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.) We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have…
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Seven steps to remarkable customer service
As a bootstrapped software company, Fog Creek couldn’t afford to hire customer service people for the first couple of years, so Michael and I did it ourselves. The time we spent helping customers t…
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Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 1
This is part one of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. The rest of the talk will be published tomorrow and Wednesday. I graduated with a B.S. in Co…
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YC: What No Means
Twice a year, Y Combinator has to say no to lots of people. Though we’ve done it 5 times already, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. Selecting a small number of investments from a much larger...
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California
You get your brand new iPod home, in its shiny black box, which you open, and the first words you see are: “Designed by Apple in California.” It’s printed on the back of every iPo…
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taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men
The article below appeared in the February 1924 issue of The American Magazine , a mass-circulation magazine that transmitted the popular culture of the day to the households of America. The magazine boasted on its cover “More than 2,000,000 Circulation,” — quite impressive for a nation whose population numbered 106…
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Zero to Riding the Rails in Four Months
Whew! four months of nose-to-the-keyboard development work, and we launched our new product! Because it was the first time we designed, developed, and deployed a complete web application with our n…
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Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web (Marc Andreessen)
Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to
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Reddit lesson #3: fuck facebook, make real friends
I've already explained how fortunate we were to get that email from Kourosh back in Feb 2006, but I'm often asked how that email ever made ...
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Paul Buchheit: Is there more to life than money?
Whenever there is a discussion about joining a startup vs working at regular job, someone will defend the boring 9-5 job by saying, "there i...
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Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 2
This is part two of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. Part one appeared yesterday. After a few years in Redmond, Washington, during which I comple…
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